The Amateur Gentleman
(1936)

93 min
|Adventure

A former boxing champion, now an innkeeper, is accused of stealing a watch from a party of guests at his inn, who happen to be members of English royalty. The old man is arrested and thrown... See full summary »

Reviews & Commentary

Frank Pettingell had been a fine bare-knuckles boxer in his day, so much that he ran away with a noble lady. Now she is dead, he runs a public house and his son is Douglas Fairbanks Jr. When a noble party stays at the house, a watch is stolen, and Pettingell is found with it. He is carted off. Fairbanks and his friend, Gordon Harker have a single clue: a scrap of paper that implicates some one. They head off to London, where Fairbanks impersonates a member of the gentry and woos noble Elissa Landi, while they try to identify the writer of the note before Pettingell is hanged for the theft.

Fairbanks had set up his own company and was filming in England. He brought over Thornton Freeland and assembled a fine cast that includes Basil Sidney, Hugh Williams, Margaret Lockwood with June Duprez and Marius Goring in uncredited bits. Clemence Dane freely adapted the novel by Jeffrey Farnol. The Regency setting and combination of upper-crust luxury and lower-class filth is striking, and everyone works very hard. As a result, this pot-boiler remains quite watchable more than 80 years later.